Chaco Canyon, Its World, and Ours

The Lay of the Land

As a first step in evaluating the connections between prehistoric and modern Pueblo societies, it’s necessary to define exactly which societies we’re talking about here. This post is a brief overview of the prehistoric cultures and modern ethnolinguistic groups in question. As noted below, these are not necessarily equivalent units, and failing to recognize this has been a frequent problem with previous reconstructions of Southwestern culture history.

On the ancient side, we are primarily dealing here with a handful of “branches” within the overall Anasazi “root.” (See my previous post on lesser-known prehistoric Southwestern societies for more on the “root and branch” system that has traditionally been used to organize Southwestern prehistory.) These branches inhabited various parts of the drainage of the San Juan River prior to AD 1300; how far back they go before that is unclear. These are the traditional branches:

Chaco Branch: The primary center of this branch is of course Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, but it extended over the entirety of the southern San Juan Basin and further south into the drainage of the Rio Puerco of the West. There are various distinctive characteristics of this branch prior to about AD 1200, when it seems to converge with the Mesa Verde branch before disappearing entirely.

Mesa Verde Branch: While Mesa Verde proper is historically the area of main research focus for this branch, recent research has shown that it was much more widespread, extending thoughout much of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah. The exact nature of its relationship with the Chaco branch is still unclear, but there has been increasing evidence for cultural similarity and historical connections between the two. There is a clear pattern of alternating population concentration implying migration between north and south on a scale of centuries prior to the depopulation of the entire area before AD 1300.

Kayenta Branch: Located in northeastern Arizona, this branch shows some clear cultural differences from Chaco and Mesa Verde, but certain sites do show evidence of influence from Mesa Verde especially during the Tsegi Phase from AD 1250 to 1300. The cliff dwellings of Navajo National Monument and Canyon de Chelly are probably the best known Kayenta sites.

On the modern side, there are 19 Pueblos in New Mexico, plus several on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona and a few communities of Pueblo ancestry in the vicinity of El Paso, Texas. They belong to six known linguistic groups, listed below.

Hopi: This language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, one of the more widespread and well-documented families of North and Central America. As the name implies, the family includes both the Great Basin hunter-gatherers of the Numic subfamily (Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone) and the complex agricultural Aztecs of the Basin of Mexico, as well as many groups in between. As a result, this family is among the best examples in the world of a lack of correlation between language family and economic orientation. The Hopis fall in between the extremes of the Numa and the Aztecs, and their language forms its own branch of Uto-Aztecan sufficiently different from the others to make it very difficult to draw any culture-historical conclusions. The three Hopi mesas (unimaginatively named “First,” “Second,” and “Third” in English) have distinctive dialects that further complicate the situation.

Zuni: Today this is just a single pueblo, speaking a language generally considered an isolate unrelated to any other. Prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 there were several Zuni pueblos, however. In addition to language, there are several other aspects of Zuni culture that tend to distinguish it from the other pueblos, although there are also enough similarities to Hopi to distinguish the two as “western” pueblos in contrast to those further east.

Keres: This is another language isolate, but spoken by several historically autonomous pueblos that still retain separate identities and speak slightly different dialects of a single mutually intelligible language. The Keres pueblos form a “bridge” in some respects between the western and eastern pueblos. Acoma and Laguna tend to pattern more with Hopi and Zuni, while Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Cochiti, and Santo Domingo are located further east and tend to have more similarities to the Rio Grande Pueblos.

Tanoan: This (sub)family is located entirely in the Rio Grande Valley and is divided into three languages/subfamilies, which are in turn related to a fourth language, Kiowa, spoken on the Great Plains. The Tanoan subfamilies are:

Tiwa: This subfamily is in turn divided into Northern and Southern divisions, which occupy the extreme north and south portions of the modern Pueblo domain. Northern Tiwa is spoken in Taos and Picuris, while Southern Tiwa is spoken at Sandia and Isleta in the vicinity of modern Albuquerque. Tiwa was also spoken historically at Ysleta del Sur near El Paso, Texas, which was founded by Southern Tiwas displaced during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. There is some evidence that the Piro pueblos south of the Southern Tiwa also spoke a language closely related to Tiwa, although this language is poorly documented and is now extinct.

Tewa: This subfamily occupies the portions of the northern Rio Grande valley near modern Santa Fe, in the pueblos of San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambe, Tesuque, Pojoaque. A closely related dialect was also spoken further south in the Galisteo Basin until approximately 1700, when the remaining residents of that area moved to the Hopi area of Arizona and founded the pueblo on First Mesa known as Hano (or Tewa), which continues to speak a dialect of the Tewa language to this day.

Towa: Today this language is spoken only at Jemez Pueblo on the western edge of the Rio Grande region, but until the 1830s it was also spoken at Pecos on the eastern edge. When the pueblo of Pecos was abandoned its remaining inhabitants moved to Jemez, where their descendants still form a distinctive segment of the population.

So that’s the present situation. The picture is complicated, and it’s hard to figure out what the historical events that resulted in this arrangement would have been. The fact that Tiwa occupies both the northern and southern ends of the Rio Grande culture area, while Towa occupies the eastern and western peripheries and Keres occupies both a core part of the center of the region and an area further west that is more similar culturally to Hopi and Zuni, makes it difficult to fit the known facts into a simple scheme of migration or cultural diffusion. Clearly the story must be more complicated, and digging into those complexities will be the purpose of the following posts in this series.

Kuaua Pueblo, Coronado State Monument, Bernalillo, New Mexico

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2 Responses

The distribution of present day Puebloan Language groups has some interesting implications concerning earlier migrations. Since most Puebloans agree they had origins in the four corners area and indeed the archaeology suggests large groups of various Puebloan people were concentrated in the area, how is it that with abandonment of the San Juan area they went off to separate, fairly well defined cultural/ linguistic areas? At that time some areas became more multi- cultural at least temporally, such as the White Mountains and southern Arizona where migrants often made villages side-by side with local populations but in general, there appears to be a decrease in multi- ethnic villages. For instance during the historic period, until the Tewa people settled at Hano in the 1600s, Tanoan speakers were not in Arizona while Uto –Aztecan speakers apparently were not in New Mexico (other than Utes on occasion). I would like to suggest that the dividing line of these two large language groups was the east side of the Chuskas, which was marked by a front line during the 1200s of defensively built “Mesa Verdean” sites.
It is tempting to define the situation simply, in that during bad times people revert back to family and clan which in itself can create strife in an “us and them” way as opposed to good times where many cultural groups came together to build a dynamic and expanding village. I am sure it is more complicated and adding to it would be cross Pueblo ties such as the kachina cult.
Some of those migrating apparently had clear destinations and agendas. The migrations of the Uto –Aztecan speakers was epic both from the archaeological standpoint and from within Hopi Mythology. The Keres and their extension into the Galisteo basin with Tanoan groups to the north and south seems to ask: why were they so intent on being there? Could jostling for control of the largest turquois mine in the southwest at Cerrillos in the center of these settlements have been part of the intent? Since there was also a much earlier push to the west in the direction of another large turquois mine in Nevada that is marked by a corridor of Anasazi lifestyle and architecture, it would seem that the search for this stone may have had as comparable an impact on settlement patterns as gold did much later in the west.
The differences in Puebloan groups should be apparent on archaeological sites even when more than one group resides in a village. Defining those differences is complicated but could be done. We no longer use “trait lists” (they did serve a purpose) but architecture and ceramic analysis still have untapped potential for defining social boundaries. Much of this is in the realm of the cultural anthropologists who could help in presenting the issues of biological vs cultural grouping and what traits in a social group are more likely to change as opposed to being simply added to an increasingly complex original social structure. As noted on earlier postings, when we define a prehistoric culture with a boundary line around it with time we tend to believe it is real. As topographically defined districts these lines work great. For areas that may have multi-cultural towns and villages, this concept does not work as well. What we really need to do is look over all of our fabricated “cultures” to see the similarities and differences at the site level and then maybe we can make more connections.